How to find your photography voice is a post made up of two parts about what I think it means to be an authentic photographer. I’ll share my experience from the past couple of years in photography, as someone who started with portraits but ended up as a landscape photographer mixed with the knowledge I gained from the books on art, photography, and psychology. If you found this post helpful please give it credit by sharing it with the people around you.
In the beginning, there was a cave painting
Once upon a time, people in the caves drew animals on the walls and thus transmitted specific messages, knowledge, and information from the environment. Time passed, society developed, and new tools were created to transfer knowledge, but one thing has remained the same for the last 40,000 years – the need for storytelling! People are social beings, interconnected through storytelling in different forms, thereby sharing life and the moments that make it up. I am convinced that each of us can be a good storyteller only if he wants to whether it’s in writing, music, photography, acting, or any other profession that involves storytelling. Even Bible says: “There is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Following these words, it’s understandable that all creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original. So, if we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.
Organize yourself
Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.
Jim Jarmusch
A good artist has behind the scenes a very good organized place where he stores his ideas, analyzes them, and expresses them through his work. That place can be anything, papers, notebooks, drawings, but what each artist has in common is a workflow. This workflow represents the way how they work with collected ideas. It does not have a unique name but looks like this:
Step 1 – Capture ideas
Step 2 – Organize ideas around some topic
Step 3 – Distill ideas
Step 4 – Express ideas
Capture ideas – The first phase is idea collecting. Somebody may see it as stealing another author’s work, but let’s be precise! I’m talking about the essence of the work, not plagiarism. Plagiarism is defined as passing someone else’s work off as our own. To capture the idea is to reverse-engineer what another author has done by taking apart things to see how and why they work. Salvador Dali once said: “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.
The first step is to find out who to copy. Second, to figure out what to copy. Who to copy is easy. We copy our heroes – the people we love, the people we’re inspired by, and the people we want to be. What to copy is a little bit trickier. You shouldn’t just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. If you just mimic the surface of somebody’s work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more than a knockoff. And don’t worry, this is ok for the beginning. As time goes by, at some point, you’ll move from imitating your heroes to emulating them. Imitation is about copying. Emulation is when imitation goes one step further, breaking through into your own thing.
For landscape photography, some tools can help you to capture your ideas precisely. One of the best, if not the best tool is the PhotoPills application (link), a photography planner with multiple items that can help you to determine moon or sun location, shadow direction, and stuff like that, with good weather application, you will have a fantastic place for idea capture. I highly recommend it. On the other side, social networks, photography books, and exhibitions are great resources of inspiration too. Steal from there everything that you like, from texts, locations, and light conditions to the photos.
Organize ideas – The second step is idea organization. A good artist organizes his ideas by different things. The season when a particular shoot can be made, time of the day, weather conditions, travel time, location, and tools he may use. Applications like Trello and Notion may help you with idea organization easily. The best way to organize your photos is to organize them for action, according to the active projects you are working on right now. Consider new information in terms of its utility, asking, ‘How is this going to help me move forward with one of my current projects?’. Based on the idea of the book “Build a Secon Brain” by Tiago Forte, artists can use the PARA system which can help on this topic so much. This PARA acronym means:
P – Projects
A – Areas
R – Resources
A – Archive
Photo projects will open for you a door into the world of photo exhibitions. Good photo projects usually consist of 6-10 photos around some topic. If you don’t have any photo project at the moment that does not mean that you can’t take photos. Just take as much as you like, and the project will show up. What you should have in mind when you create some project is that they have a beginning and an end, take place during a specific period, and then they finish. Second, they have a specific, clear outcome that needs to happen for them to be checked off as complete, such as “finalize”, “exhibition”, or “Instagram post”.
Photo areas should help you to enrich your photography portfolio. For example, these areas can be, landscapes, cityscapes, seascapes, nature, and ICM photographs. Mainly, they represent a long-term responsibility you want to manage over time, longer time horizon, and are less immediately actionable.
Resources represent topics or interests that may be useful in the future and may become actionable depending on the situation. This is a catchall for anything that doesn’t belong to a project or an area and could include any topic you’re interested in gathering information about.
The archive represents a folder of old projects that you did and may be useful for some new projects in the future.
Distill ideas – Distill your ideas to find the essence, to find things that resonate with you the most, and to use them in your things. The most important factor in whether your stored ideas can survive that journey into the future is their discoverability – how easy it is to discover what they contain and access the specific points that are most immediately useful. In terms of photography, you should distill photo sources, directions, shadows, and colors – The essential things that build photographs.
Express ideas – All the previous steps—capturing, organizing, and distilling—are geared toward one ultimate purpose: sharing your ideas, your own story, and your knowledge with others.
One of the most important things, when expression comes to my mind, is to print your photos! This is a very very important part of the process which can help you to grow as a photographer faster! Print your photos as much as possible, not only to show them to your friends and family but because you will learn a lot from this process, and see your photos in a new way. Print, frame, and put the photo on your wall, or someone else’s wall.
Give credits
As an individual who shares the work of others, it is imperative to ensure that the creators receive proper recognition for their efforts. In today’s world of reblogs and retweets, crediting work may seem like an insignificant task, but it is important and the right thing to do. You should handle the work of others with the same respect and care as if it were your own. Most often, the emphasis on proper attribution is placed on the original creator of the work, but this is only half of the picture. When you fail to properly attribute the work that you share, not only do you deprive the creator of credit, but also the audience who is exposed to the work. Without proper attribution, the audience is unable to gain a deeper understanding of the work or discover more like it.
Good attribution involves providing context for the work being shared. This includes information such as the nature of the work, the creator, how it was made, the time and place of creation, why it is being shared, why it is important, and where more similar work can be found. In essence, attribution is like placing small museum labels next to the work being shared, providing context and background information.
To fake a photograph, all you have to do is change the caption. To fake a painting, change the attribution.
Errol Morris
Share your knowledge
Consider what aspects of your process you can share with your intended audience. Have you acquired a specific skill or craft? What methods do you use? Are you proficient in using certain tools or materials? What knowledge is associated with your job? As soon as you learn something new, take the opportunity to pass it on to others. Share your list of recommended reading materials and provide access to useful references. Create instructional guides and post them online using a combination of images, text, and video. Walk people through a portion of your process, step by step.
Passing on knowledge to others does not diminish the value of your work, but rather enhances it. By educating others on how to perform your work, you are effectively increasing interest in your work. People will feel a greater connection to your work as you grant them access to your expertise.
Read books
Steal like an artist – Austin Kleon (link)
Show your work – Austin Kleon (link)
Keep going – Austin Kleon (link)
Build a second brain – Tiago Forte (link)
Ending words
That’s all for the second part of “How to find your photography voice”. I hope that these two parts will help you or inspire you to become a better photographer. The main key is that things around us are not new, and we should connect them in our way to create “new” things. How to connect those things should be done by organizing them in the style which we like and in the end, sharing them with the world.